Track-based hybrid service discovery in mobile ad-hoc networks

Service discovery is a challenging task in mobile ad-hoc networks which are characterized by their dynamic, infrastructure-less and bandwidth-limited nature. The goal of this paper is to develop a bandwidth efficient approach for service discovery in mobile ad-hoc networks. The main contribution of this paper is a novel track-based hybrid service discovery scheme. The proposed scheme performs service discovery based on the one dimensional proactive structure (e.g. tracks), instead of the existing two dimensional proactive structures (e.g. zones). This scheme can lead to reduced proactive traffic due to its light-weight organization of the hybrid structure. The density of proactive tracks is adapted to network traffic pattern dynamically for less proactive traffic. We simulated the Track-based approach in ns-2 network simulator with various network scales and mobility, and compared the performance with pure reactive (e.g. flooding) and Zone-based hybrid (e.g. bordercasting) protocols. Preliminary results show that, the track:-based approach achieved better efficient trade-offs between control packet overhead and querying success rate with minimal proactive costs among all the approaches compared